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Thomas Tomkins When David Heard Sacred Choral Works Thomas Tomkins When David Heard SACRED CHORAL WORKS Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge Andrew Nethsingha CHANDOS early music Ben Wright Ben Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, with its Director of Music, Andrew Nethsingha Thomas Tomkins (1572 – 1656) 1 When David heard that Absalom was slain 5:28 Full anthem for five-part choir 2 Almighty God, which hast knit together 5:09 Verse anthem for eight-part choir and organ Alec D’Oyly treble Robert Murray John treble Hamish McLaren counter-tenor Thomas Blackie counter-tenor John Clapham tenor Kieran Brunt tenor Xavier Hetherington tenor Geoffrey Clapham bass Jonathan Hyde bass 3 Magnificat 5:40 for five-part choir and organ from the Sixth Service Alec D’Oyly treble Oliver Brown treble Hamish McLaren counter-tenor Thomas Blackie counter-tenor 3 4 Nunc dimittis 2:49 for five-part choir and organ from the Sixth Service Alec D’Oyly treble Oliver Brown treble Alexander Simpson counter-tenor Hamish McLaren counter-tenor 5 Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom 7:14 Full anthem for five-part choir 6 A Sad Pavan for these distracted times 3:30 7 My shepherd is the living Lord 3:51 Verse anthem for four-part choir and organ Thomas Blackie counter-tenor Samuel Oladeinde tenor 8 Behold, I bring you glad tidings 3:39 Verse anthem for ten-part choir and organ 4 9 Voluntary in A minor 3:32 10 Jubilate 7:09 for ten-part choir with organ from the Third ‘( Great’) Service Alexander Simpson counter-tenor Hamish McLaren counter-tenor Oliver El-Holiby counter-tenor Thomas Blackie counter-tenor Guy Edmund-Jones tenor Kieran Brunt tenor Samuel Oladeinde tenor Xavier Hetherington tenor Augustus Perkins Ray bass Geoffrey Clapham bass John Holland-Avery bass Jonathan Hyde bass 11 Clarifica me Pater 2:25 5 12 Te Deum 11:45 for ten-part choir with organ from the Third ‘( Great’) Service Alexander Simpson counter-tenor Hamish McLaren counter-tenor Oliver El-Holiby counter-tenor Thomas Blackie counter-tenor Guy Edmund-Jones tenor Kieran Brunt tenor Samuel Oladeinde tenor Xavier Hetherington tenor Augustus Perkins Ray bass Geoffrey Clapham bass John Holland-Avery bass Jonathan Hyde bass TT 62:21 Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge Freddie James organ Andrew Nethsingha © Annelies van der Vegt der van © Annelies Sir Arnold Bax: Tone Poems Andrew Nethsingha Thomas Tomkins: Sacred Choral Works The modern revival of interest in the music display more convincingly than any of his of Thomas Tomkins (1572 – 1656) began contemporaries. The glad tidings of Christ’s less than a century ago. First came the 1928 birth are sung by the trebles alone, in the publication of Tomkins’s English Service reserved manner appropriate to church music in the Tudor Church Music series; delivery, while behind them the organ frolics the complete edition of the keyboard music away (especially at the word ‘joy’) with secular and Denis Stevens’s biography of Tomkins abandon. The angel throng then sings ‘Glory appeared in the 1950s; and Bernard Rose’s be to God in the highest’ in messily ebullient edition of the ninety-four anthems in the ten-part polyphony: these angels are in posthumous publication Musica Deo Sacra party mode. The arrival of ‘peace on earth’ is (‘Music to the service of God’) was drip-fed presented in reverential homophony before from the early 1960s to the early 1990s ‘good will’ sets up a repeated plagal ostinato in a series of six volumes. More recently, to bring this seasonal anthem to a reassuring Tomkins has been the subject of renewed close. enthusiasm with the publication in 2005 of Anthony Boden’s Thomas Tomkins: the last My shepherd is the living Lord Elizabethan. My shepherd is the living Lord sets the mid- sixteenth century metrical version of the 23rd Behold, I bring you glad tidings Psalm (‘The Lord is my shepherd’) and is cast Tomkins excelled in the genre of the verse in calming pastoral tones. First a solo counter- anthem, and three of his finest are presented tenor and then a tenor and counter-tenor duet on this recording. Behold, I bring you glad are answered by measured four-part choir. tidings shows both the sophistication and directness of musical expression that were Almighty God, which hast knit together typical of the early seventeenth century – Almighty God, which hast knit together is a characteristics that Tomkins was able to setting of the Collect for All Saints’ Day, 8 which achieves its effect with characteristic that this prayer for compassion will ultimately effortlessness on Tomkins’s part. Solo voices be answered; so Tomkins sets the final Amen appear one after the other, inexorably leading with music that is smoulderingly glamorous to choral conjunction in order to show the in its gratitude. knitting together of the chosen ones ‘in one communion and fellowship’. Thereafter, the When David heard that Absalom was slain ‘unspeakable joys’ are just that – musical When David heard that Absalom was slain is syncopations that paint the idea of joy Tomkins’s most famous anthem. It is a setting much more economically and effectively of words taken from the Old Testament’s than a thousand words could. The choir’s Second Book of Samuel, and its narrative final ‘Amen’ is similarly effective. You can makes this masterwork more akin to the say the word ‘Amen’ as many times as you genre of the sacred madrigal than to the like, but prayerful closure is best achieved church anthem. The heart-rending grief of by marshalling jovially assured eight-voice David at the loss of his son offers a foretaste polyphony. of the tragedy that Tomkins himself would suffer, which began with the death of his Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom wife in 1642, four years before parliamentary The two full anthems included here are for forces took over Worcester and ripped the five voices (in both cases the counter-tenor organ out of the cathedral, and with it the divides). Almighty God, the fountain of heart of Tomkins’s musical contribution to all wisdom is a masterpiece of careful text that institution. setting. The pleading suspension at the word ‘beseech’, the transparent desolation at the A Sad Pavan for these distracted times words ‘we cannot ask’, and the plangent It is hardly surprising that when his homophony cascading towards the word musical leadership at Worcester Cathedral ‘worthiness’ culminate in the crucifyingly was terminated by surrender to the uncomfortable harmonic false relations that Parliamentarians, Tomkins turned to drive the nails into the name ‘Jesus Christ’. composing music which he himself could play But the message of this post-Communion in private at the keyboard. ‘A Sad Pavan for collect, in spite of its self-deprecating tone, is these distracted times’ is a despondent enough 9 title in itself, and the music within it is the composer constructed a ‘distracted’ non- compelling because of its sincere melancholy. liturgical creation, that error matters little. At times his heart almost stops beating, but Tomkins the ardent royalist carries on his Third Service: Te Deum / Jubilate nostalgic grieving until the bitter end of this The Third Service is the largest and most iconic work. ambitious of the collections of canticles that Tomkins wrote. It is dubbed ‘Mr Tomkins’s Voluntary in A minor Great Service’ in its manuscript source, this The Voluntary in A minor shows the moniker indicating that the setting is not joint influences of the keyboard styles of just substantial, but that it is constructed William Byrd (c. 1540 – 1623, the assumed on the principle of alternating passages for former teacher of Tomkins) and John Bull soloists with those for full choir. The choir (c. 1560 – 1628). Tomkins revered the music splits into ten real parts on occasion, and the of those two composers for different reasons: richness of the solo writing means that it is Byrd’s music ‘for Substance’ and Bull’s music not always instantly possible to distinguish ‘for the Hand’. Indeed, Tomkins’s keyboard aurally between passages for full and reduced music replicates both the tight counterpoint of textures. The scale and expertise required of Byrd’s style and the virtuosity of Bull’s. all the singers make it probable that this was a work written for use at the Chapel Royal. Clarifica me Pater This is demonstrated nowhere better than Sixth Service: Magnificat / Nunc dimittis in Clarifica me Pater (dated September By contrast, the more modest Sixth Service 1650, when Tomkins was two years short was written at the very end of the sixteenth of his eightieth birthday). Thecantus firmus century when Tomkins was in his twenties, that makes up the top voice of the keyboard and shows clearly the debt that Tomkins texture is the plainchant melody of the owed to William Byrd and Thomas Morley Passiontide antiphon that Tomkins himself (1557 / 58 – 1602) – a copy of Morley’s incorrectly labelled Glorifica me Pater. But A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical as the Roman Catholic plainchant is used Music survives with Tomkins’s annotations. purely as antique scaffolding beneath which The fascination that Tomkins had for the 10 musical practices of his forbears never left high-profile venues around the UK, the him, and although he lived until the years Choir regularly performs with orchestras and of the Protectorate, he was by birth and ensembles such as the Royal Philharmonic temperament an Elizabethan. Thomas Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Tomkins is the paradigm of a composer who and Philharmonia Orchestra. In the course is individually innovative yet generically of a busy international touring schedule it conservative.
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